Black Christmas may have the claim of being the first film to use a variation of an urban legend, but it certainly wasn’t the last or the most memorable. Some claim it is the first body-count/slasher flick, having preceded Halloween by five years, but that just is not the case. Italian filmmakers such as Mario Bava and American schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis had been making that sort of film for about ten years by 1974.